Commentary Virtually undetectable The Andrew Sullivan phenomenon Alan sinfield Andrew Sullivan sprang into prominence in the early 1990s when he came out as a gay man while editing the right-wing American weekly magazine The New Republic. In Virtually Normal (1995) he reviewed prohibitionist, liberationist, conservative and liberal ideas about homosexuality and society.* He concluded that […]

The space of flows and timeless time Manuel Castells’s The Information Age Simon bromley is not new. Giddens, for example, has argued that the world is increasingly moving towards a situation where ʻthe consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized than beforeʼ, and in both The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-Identity […]

Contingent ontologies Sex, gender and ‘woman’ in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler Stella sandford a concerted critique of the sex/gender distinction has not mitigated this sense of historical importance, or even historical necessity. But developments in feminist theory – in particular the claims being made on behalf of various feminisms of difference – and […]

Interview Étienne BalibarConjectures and conjunctures PO: In Spinoza and Politics you set out to show that the relationship between philosophy and politics is such that ʻeach implies the otherʼ. Was this true of your own intellectual development?Balibar: I think so, yes. The two things were closely connected in the circle around Althusser at the École […]

Reviews The tamagochi and the objet petit aSlavoj Žižek, The Žižek Reader, edited by Elizabeth and Edmond Wright, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999. xii + 332 pp., £55.00 hb., £15.99 pb., ISBN 0 631 21200 0 hb., 0 631 21201 9 pb. This is all delivered with such good humour that the critic stands disarmed. Anyone wishing […]

Obituary Roy Edgley, 1925–1999In the early 1970s the Guardian reported that Professor Roy Edgley of Sussex University had gathered around him a group of younger, like-minded thinkers and founded a movement of radical philosophy with a journal. This report lay oblique to the actual facts of the case. Roy Edgley was not one of the […]

to see such conduct as a fitting counterpart to the purity and intensity of his philosophical vision. István Mészáros referred, in his eloquent funeral tribute, to pregnant remarks Roy made when very ill towards the end of his life. Perhaps it may be excusable to offer a personal recollection from that time. In our last […]

Commentary The significance of the twentieth century Fred halliday The politics of the twentieth century have been marked by three great processes: war, revolution and democratization. The first half of the century was dominated by two world wars – conflicts which engulfed almost all of Europe, and much of the Middle and Far East, and […]

‘Radical evil’ revived Hitler, Kant, Luther, neo-Lacanianism Henry staten By a terrible coincidence, I revise this paper for publication in the shadow of the mass murder at Colombine High School in Littleton, Colorado. From all sides come the anguished questions: ʻWhy?ʼ ʻHow could such a thing happen?ʼ ʻWhat sort of people could do it?ʼ The […]

Philosophizing the everyday The philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies John roberts The following presents a genealogy and critique of the concept of the ʻeverydayʼ, looking at the philosophical, political and cultural conflicts and contexts which radically transformed its contents after the Russian Revolution from a term synonymous with the ʻdailyʼ and […]

Of the few myths about the sense of hearing, the most memorable is that of Ulysses and the Sirens. Lashed to the mast of his ship, Ulysses alone experiences the pleasure of the Sirensʼ song, while the crew, their ears plugged with balls of wax, row on regardless of his signals to be released. Like […]

Reviews Respect (or lack of it) Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. viii + 246 pp., £45.00 hb., 0 7456 1655 0. ^ Tim Hayward, Political Theory and Ecological Values, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. viii + 196 pp., £49.50 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 7456 1808 1 hb., 0 7456 […]

Conference reports PleasantvilleAnnual Conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 6–8 September 1999, OxfordThe Hegel Society of Great Britain annually ensconces itself in the fortified quaintness of Pembroke College, Oxford, whose charms of exclusivity are as menacingly kitsch as its dining table mats, which picture an idyllic escape that is merely the quadrangle outside, […]

Commentary Backwoods musicology Roger Scruton’s aesthetics of music Ben watson Roger Scruton is a right-wing pundit regularly rolled out by the British media to voice ʻbravely unfashionableʼ points of view. After the march against New Labour organized by the Countryside Alliance, he published a book in defence of fox-hunting. However, unlike most backwoods right-wingers, Scruton […]

Not so long ago, theoretical insight was usually defended in terms of its universal inclusiveness or powers of generalization. It used to be that any theory worth the name – a theory of evolution or class conflict, a theory of the unconscious or of signification – shared something of the ambition and scope associated with […]

Childhood experience and the image of utopia The broken promise of Adorno’s Proustian sublimations Matt F. Connell adjustment, amounting to an uncritical internalization of the reality which insists that the infant must only enjoy that which is socially sanctioned. Children must progressively give up earlier forms of happiness and pleasure, which demand everything in an […]

Since the mid-1980s there has been a major revival of interest in the work of Siegfried Kracauer, focusing on the essays he wrote during the Weimar Republic for the Frankfurter Zeitung. [1] As a result of this renewed interest in Kracauerʼs early writings, a revisionist school of Kracauer criticism has emerged, particularly in the USA. […]

The interview with Agnes Heller, ʻPost-Marxism and the Ethics of Modernityʼ (RP 94) touches on what should be a key debate among intellectuals on the Left today: does a perspective critical of the authoritarian legacy of modern revolutions spell the end of the project of political revolution, or does it on the contrary entail rethinking […]